Portrait of an Unknown Woman

by Vanora Bennett

  It was pandemonium. Rightly or wrongly, all the parents instantly identified their own eldest child as the ringleader. Each of them rushed to grab whichever offending offspring they could lay hands on.

  “Tommy!” shrieked Margaret Roper.

  “Tommy!” shrieked Cecily Heron.

  “Tommy!” shrieked Elizabeth Dauncey.

  “Tommy!” shrieked Meg Clement.

  After a scuffle, Will Roper caught two or three small Ropers under his arms and strode off, weighed down by children, back toward the dormitory.

  Holbein could hear him saying, “You’re a disgrace!” with laughter in his voice as he climbed the stairs two at a time.

  John and Anne More followed, dragging their children by their thin little arms.

  Cecily and Margaret trapped most of the stragglers and shooed them off in the same direction, looking forbidding and amused by turns.

  That left the room almost empty.

  Holbein watched Elizabeth (daintily) and Meg (with more energy) reach for the last two breakaways. Naturally it was Meg who caught them. With one collar in each hand, she pulled the two little boys toward her. The fight had gone out of them now; they could see the game was over. They hung from her hands like puppies; two identical sets of penitent pink cheeks and downcast eyes; two identical aquiline noses.

  “Tommy,” she scolded, looking crossly down at the slightly larger boy.

  Then she stopped; looked astonished; and turned from him to stare at the smaller Tommy. “Tommy . . .” she said to this one, with wild surmise dawning in her eyes.

  “I’m sorry,” the second, smaller Tommy answered, wriggling in shame.

  A deathly silence fell.

  Elizabeth, standing by the fire, was also staring in growing horror at the smaller Tommy.

  Meg’s head was turning from one twinlike child to another. Seen side by side like this, you couldn’t help but notice that they were as alike as two peas in a pod.

  The little boys didn’t understand the hush. They began to cry guiltily.

  “It wasn’t me,” Meg’s Tommy whimpered.

  The other one piped up, gazing beseechingly at his own mother, frozen at the fireplace: “It was all Tommy Roper’s idea.”

  “Shh,” Meg said quietly, leaning down to kiss her child’s mouth shut, unable to avoid giving the other little changeling a sick look of recognition.

  Then she looked at Holbein’s appalled face. And what she read in it seemed to answer the question her anxious little frown had been asking all evening, ever since she’d seen the painting.

  She nodded at him—a cold, determined nod. “Will you take them up, please?” she said. It was an order, not a request.

  As he walked out of the door behind the children’s twinkling little legs, almost as eager as they were to escape the atmosphere of enmity at his back, he heard her voice—flat, accusing, and full of certainty—break the silence.

  “Our boys look like brothers,” the voice said. “My husband is the father of your son, isn’t he?” And then the door shut, leaving him outside in the darkness.

  She came to him soon afterward, in his parlor. He was standing at the window in the dark, watching the wind sweep through the vines on the other side of the glass and toss more clouds across the sky, like hay being pitchforked, obscuring the stars with the storm to come, when he heard the door click. He didn’t turn. He knew who it was.

  “All she said was ‘I have nothing to tell you,’ ” Meg said in a monotone.

  He didn’t dare answer. She was carrying a candlestick. She glided across the room to the picture, to the corner where Elizabeth was depicted pushing her out of the way and giving John Clement that lascivious look as she stripped the glove from her hand. Meg put down the candlestick on the table and stared at the painted scene again.

  From behind, Holbein could see her head slowly nodding, as if all her suspicions were at last being confirmed.

  “You knew,” Meg said, still with her back to him. “You saw them both and you realized. That’s why you changed the picture, isn’t it?” She turned round. A worse thought had come to her. Her haunted eyes searched his face. “Or perhaps Elizabeth told you,” she said accusingly. “You used to be friends.”

  Holbein felt crushed with guilt. He’d always known this would be a dangerous picture, but this wasn’t the secret he’d meant to reveal. “I saw the boys when I got here. I just guessed,” he said helplessly. “I thought you knew already.”

  And all at once there was no more place for words in his heart; just the tingling urgency of his need to put his arms around her and spin her round and put his mouth to hers.

  Twined together, with his body crushing hers inside his, and his leg pushing hungrily between her skirts, against the dark shifting vine leaves and the dapple of clouds and the stars, he was transported back in time to that first kiss long ago under the mulberry tree. Only this time she didn’t pull away. This time he felt her respond; felt her hands on his back, clawing him closer; felt her breasts moving against his chest; felt her breath quicken.

  Her open eyes were fixed on his face, full of knowledge. His heart was bursting. Still crushing her against his chest with one arm, he untwined the other just far enough to pick up the candlestick and then began drawing her slowly toward his mattress in the little back room, still kissing her wetly, almost bursting with desire, murmuring incoherent endearments as he negotiated the door with an elbow and eased her back to the ground.

  Afterward—just afterward, when he was still sighing and sated and happier than he’d ever known a man could be, with one of his big master-craftsman’s hands still possessively on one of her pale girl’s breasts with its childishly pink nipple—he whispered fuzzily: “I love you.” It was what he’d always wanted to tell her. Always, for as long as he could remember.

  It was why he’d left his wife a second time, and why he’d lived like a monk for the past year. This was his dream coming true. Safe in the darkness, with the sounds of the storm only just audible through the window, he felt faint with the joyous release of it.

  She whispered something back, nuzzling his neck. Holbein couldn’t make out her words, but he wanted them to have been “I love you too” enough to believe that was what he’d heard.

  It was only after a few minutes that he startled awake, suddenly uneasy, suddenly thinking that what she’d actually been muttering might have been: “I hate him.”

  But it was too late to ask. Her eyes were shut.

  20

  I tiptoed out of Master Hans’s room before it was light. Very gently, I wriggled out from under the thickset arm pinioning me to the mattress, as if by moving too quickly I might hurt it, and kissed his cheek, and dressed my crumpled self as best I could in the dark. I wasn’t shocked by where I found myself when my eyes opened, just by my calm.

  I knew I’d committed a sin, but I was full of a terrible lightness.

  My mind was shying away from what I now suspected must be the reality of my past—John coming to Chelsea not to court me but to pursue a secret affair with Elizabeth.

  Of me being the second-best almost daughter, the wallflower who was still there, available to be married—his only practical way of cementing his ties with the family of the man who’d helped him most in life.

  I’d go mad if I let myself think about that final betrayal. I was going to stay in the sunlit, innocent world I’d discovered in the orchard instead.

  After all those years of struggle with the imperfections of everyday life, the idea that I’d at last found a way of creating my own idyll just by making love to Hans Holbein was enough to make me feel euphoric. For the first time I could remember, I felt free: beautiful and dangerous and free.

  I felt my way up the stairs in the gray predawn with my nostrils full of the smell of him and my muscles warm with remembered embraces, avoiding whatever creaking boards I could. I needed to shake myself out of the languid, selfish, pleasurable way my body and mind were behaving; shake my memory away
from the fire of the night. I wanted to be back in my room, washed and fresh, before Tommy woke up and came to me.

  I needed to stop feverishly comparing the quiet caution that making love with John had become and the hot wet passion I’d felt in Hans’s arms. I needed time to think.

  Then I saw a gleam of light through a doorway. A candle was burning in the chapel. Father must be at prayer already.

  I darted up the last few steps, suddenly terrifyingly aware of my hair flowing down my back and my unlaced stomacher. No one must know.

  Only when I was safely on the other side of my door, watching the catch click into place, did I breathe again. I leaned against the wall. My legs and arms were shaking, so I could hardly move. I could feel bruises on my neck and breasts. But my heart was bubbling with laughter.

  Thomas More let himself into Hans Holbein’s parlor soon after sunup. He found the painter, looking rumpled and puffy-eyed, staring at his picture from the window seat. The light wasn’t good enough to paint by. The sky was still sullen and overcast after the night’s storm.

  Holbein leapt up as soon as he saw More. He bowed, then looked at his feet, then knocked over the empty cup at his side.

  The painter retrieved it from the floor, cursing under his breath, and set it on the table next to his clean paintbrushes.

  “I was born clumsy,” he said, looking ashamed. “My father always said so.”

  “I’m sorry to interrupt,” More said gently. “I was hoping you’d let me take another look at your masterpiece. I woke up thinking about it.”

  Holbein, already full of chaotic guilts, found it almost stopped his breath when More stepped up to the left-hand side of the painting to look at the likenesses of Elizabeth and Meg.

  But he didn’t comment except to say rather sadly, as he stepped back a long moment later, “This picture tells more stories every time I look at it. You have an enviable talent for the truth.”

  Holbein hung his head, not knowing how to reply.

  Sir Thomas looked older this morning, he noticed, finding himself unable to stop observing line and texture despite all the mass of worries weighing on him.

  The luminousness of that dark skin had thinned, refining the shapely strength of More’s features, as if a rich oil painting was turning into an etching of thin lines before his eyes. Perhaps it was the cold gray light. Or perhaps it was Hans Holbein’s own uncertain mood. He’d woken up and reached happily for Meg and found her gone. So he didn’t know whether he was the happiest man in the world or the most wretched. He could still smell her skin and feel her breasts under his lips, but would he ever be alone with her again? He urgently needed to find her and see how she reacted to the sight of him. He could hardly just walk in to where he could hear the family gathering and calmly start eating breakfast next to her in front of everyone. But his belly was rumbling with hunger. And while he was stumping around in his quarters, not knowing what to do with himself, he’d started looking at the picture and found himself thinking again—despite the wonder of what had happened in the night—whether he’d committed the sin of pride by putting into it everything he’d thought he knew about the Mores.

  He’d seen so much of the truth; but as he was only now beginning to realize, he’d understood so little of what he’d seen. It might have been the biggest mistake he’d ever made to stir up all this trouble.

  “Have you ever been in love, Master Hans?” More asked unexpectedly, with his eyes on the picture again.

  Holbein goggled and gulped, but the older man didn’t wait for an answer, just went on, almost to himself, “I don’t know why, but I woke up this morning thinking about my first love.”

  Holbein couldn’t believe what he was hearing. More was a man of great public grace who never spoke about his private feelings. This couldn’t be happening.

  “I was sixteen . . . just out of university . . . starting at New Hall as a barrister . . . full of hope and promise . . . when I saw her. The most beautiful girl I’d ever imagined, standing opposite me at a dance with the most beautiful smile in the world on her face. She was up from Norfolk to stay with an uncle. It was as if I’d been struck by lightning. I was on fire from head to toe. I’d have married her right there and then if I could.”

  More stopped, as if choosing his words. “Nothing came of it, of course,” he went on. “A snatched kiss or two. A few meetings and letters. Her uncle saw me off as soon as he noticed. He’d brought her to London to be betrothed to someone else. A better man than me: a young neighbor of hers from Norfolk who’d just completed his education. My father was told in no uncertain terms to stop me meeting her. I thought my heart was broken for a while, but I survived. I never saw her again, though of course”—he nodded at the likeness of Elizabeth Dauncey in Holbein’s picture, as if explaining why he was telling the story now—“much later, I named my pretty second daughter after her.”

  He turned his gaze away from the painting and looked straight into Hans Holbein’s eyes. “I was a young fool, of course. I overreacted. I tried to become a monk. But they married me off too, a year later, and I found in the end that I could love my wife perfectly well. And my second wife too, if it comes to that. I had no idea back then of the lasting happiness you can get from your family.” He laughed—softly, but in a way that Holbein felt might easily contain menace. “Nothing ever does come of these storms of emotion, does it? But I was still too much of a child then to know what adults all find out sooner or later: that you only find real contentment by doing the decent thing.”

  There was a sudden shiver of rain against the window. Gratefully, Holbein turned his eyes away and fixed them on the spurts of water running down between the drenched vine leaves. He was trying to will the heat out of his flaming cheeks. With no more success, he was trying to stifle his hot memories of tongues and muscle and breasts and Meg’s body harpooned under his on those guiltily rumpled sheets that he knew to be just behind More’s back, through the bedroom door he’d forgotten to shut. If he didn’t know that More couldn’t possibly know how he’d spent his night, it would be only too easy to think he’d been discovered and was being subtly warned off. He doesn’t know, he told himself. He can’t.

  But he’d have found it easier to pretend innocence if he hadn’t known More to be at least as good as he was himself at intuiting other people’s secrets.

  “It’s good to be able to open my heart to you, Master Hans,” More said, turning, like Holbein, to watch the rivulets of rain. “I like knowing there are no secrets between us.” Then, politely: “Have you had breakfast?”

  Holbein nodded. He couldn’t speak. However hungry he was, there was no way he was going to walk in on the family’s breakfast with the man making these knowing, playful, half-accusing, guilt-inducing remarks.

  They were making his stomach churn worse than ever. For once, he felt he needed peace and solitude even more than bread and ale.

  More made his last enigmatic comment from the doorway: “Meg’s family is from Norfolk, you know. That was partly why I adopted her. She’s very dear to me.”

  As soon as he was alone, Holbein slumped back down into the window seat. He leaned one red cheek against the glass and stared unseeingly at the raindrops that were beginning again, letting the heat out of his body, and feeling the cold seep in like fear.

  She bobbed up out of the drowning greenery outside and tapped on the steamy window, startling him out of his reverie. She had no cloak on. Her hair was stuck to her head. Her clothes were clinging to her body. But her face was lit up with laughter as she beckoned him outdoors.

  Holbein rushed out into the garden, stopping only to grab his own cloak as he raced for the door.

  He couldn’t believe his happiness. He pulled her under a tree, rejoicing in the yielding softness of her, covering her face with relieved kisses that quickly turned hard and urgent.

  “You’ll get as wet as me,” she whispered, pulling at the cloak he’d still got slung over his arm and laughing teasingly up at him aga
in.

  He’d forgotten the cloak. He laughed, delighted, and pulled it playfully over both their heads. In the rough darkness underneath it, he nuzzled his nose softly against hers. “Meg,” he whispered, with a blissful smile practically splitting his face, staring down at the perfection of the face he’d always loved, as if seeing it for the first time. “I can’t believe this is happening.”

  She didn’t answer, just looked unblinkingly back up at him until he touched her eyelids shut with gentle lips and moved his mouth back to hers and went back to kissing her in earnest.

  When he began to shake it was she who, leaning into him with the whole of one side of her body, as if their flesh was melting together, led him off down a path to a clump of elder trees behind the deserted barn.

  She spread the cloak on the relatively dry ground at their feet and drew him down next to her on it, and clinging to him as though she were drowning, she pulled him on top of her. He looked down at her and opened his mouth as if to speak. He was torn between delicious desires; there was so much he wanted to say to her.

  But she muttered, urgently, “Not now. Don’t say anything now,” and shut his mouth with her lips.

  As soon as his breathing had returned to something like normal, he propped his head up on one elbow and gazed at her with eyes full of dreams. There was a leaf in her hair. He picked it out. The rain had stopped. The leaves were dripping quietly. The world was at peace.

  “I could stay here all day with you, like this,” he began, unable to think beyond their embrace. He wanted to go on and say “I love you,” but she wouldn’t let him.

  “Tommy might be looking for me. There’s no time,” she said wistfully. Her face set, and she added: “. . . and John will be here before nightfall.”

  That thought seemed to sober her into action. She wriggled out from under him and sat up, brushing herself down, smoothing her skirts back over her legs, rearranging her bodice, self-consciously regaining her poise.